In recent years, electronic mail (“e-mail”) has become a prevalent form of communication. Because e-mail is typically fast, convenient, and easy to use, e-mail has become a popular media for communications in both business and personal settings. In particular, travelers often use e-mail when they are away from their home or office to keep in touch with family, friends, or business associates. A number of techniques for obtaining e-mail even when a traveler is away from the home or office are known in the prior art. For example, various telephone or other data connections allow e-mail users to “dial up” a remote e-mail server to send and receive messages, as appropriate. Sophisticated internet service providers (“ISPs”) often provide local dial up numbers for users traveling to remote locations. Although such numbers are convenient, they are often unavailable while a traveler is on an airplane, boat, train, bus, car, or other vehicle. When a traveler is on a long airplane flight (while traveling across the continent or across an ocean for example), he or she may be away from his or her e-mail for a prolonged period of time.
Telephone connections from airplanes to the ground have been available for some time. Such connections have been used to place modem connections from, for example, notebook computers carried by passengers on the aircraft to remote servers for data connections such as e-mail, network access, and the like. Phone connections presently available on aircraft and other vehicles, however, typically exhibit a number of marked disadvantages. First, such connections are frequently expensive because they require dedicated channels on satellites or other very expensive communications channels. Moreover, phone connections currently available from airplanes are subject to the noise and connection loss problems associated with wireless communications and phone connections may be cumbersome for most notebook computer users because the configurations and other technical requirements may be non-intuitive or unavailable to most users. Additionally, the bandwidth provided by most telecommunications links from aircraft is frequently very low, e.g., on the order of 2,400 bits per second. Such slow data transfer rates are often unsuitable for many applications, including web surfing and e-mail exchange. It is therefore desirable to create an e-mail system that allows users to send and receive data (such as e-mail) while traveling on a vehicle such as an aircraft, without the expense, configuration overhead, and bandwidth restrictions imposed by systems available in the prior art.